Tuesday, January 13, 2009

Good workout, old body

My weight workout went well last night. I increased the weight on dumbbell snatches, a lift I did for the first time ever a week ago. Snatches are a much more dynamic move than most lifts and I'm really enjoying them.

After the snatches, the rest of my workout was sets of 5x5, so the weights were significantly higher than last week when I did 2x20s. Overall, the workout went very well and I was exhausted when I was done.

At home, while cooking dinner, I slipped in my kitchen on a wet floor, and did something to my left knee. This is the same knee that had ACL reconstruction surgery almost 7 years ago, and it feels like I tweaked something in the lateral meniscus. It didn't swell up, but I can really feel it when I change directions when walking.

I opted to skip my snowshoe run this morning, figuring that the uneven terrain would bother the knee a lot. Plus, I felt like I was still catching up on sleep, so I slept from 9:30 until 6:45 this morning - a long night of sleep for me. I'm going to try running on the treadmill tonight, where the footing will be nice and safe. If that bothers me, I'll ride the Lifecycle instead. Because a deep freeze is arriving tonight with high winds, I was planning to run indoors most of the rest of the week. With what I did to my knee last night, it's probably best to stay on a smooth surface for a few days anyway.

This morning, I just felt old. My left knee is tweaked. My right wrist and right elbow are also still sore from a skiing fall I took weeks ago. If I wasn't skiing or lifting, the wrist and elbow would probably be fine by now. If I didn't ski, maybe they would never have gotten hurt to begin with. The soreness isn't impeding my lifting or skiing, but I don't think it's letting things heal either. The skiing each weekend bothers the wrist. Pole plants really seem to irritate it.

On another note, this Thursday is a day that many Vermonters have been waiting for. Currently, there are two states where iPhones are not sold. Users of iPhones who come to Vermont are OK because AT&T has been piggybacking on Unicel's network. But, we've been unable to buy them in state because Unicel and Verizon dominated the market and AT&T had no presence. Last year, Verizon bought Unicel and it looked like the iPhone was never going to make it to the state. But, someone challenged the deal in Vermont courts because it would have given Verizon a virtual monopoly on cell service in the state. The result was that Verizon sold the Vermont portion of Unicel to AT&T.

On Thursday, iPhones become available in VT. I have to admit that I resisted getting a cell phone for years. Finally, after a terrible travel snafu on the way home from Western States in 2006, my wife and I decided that we needed to get a cell phone. We've had a bare bones model with bare bones service for 2.5 years. But, with our children growing up and spending time with friends away from home a lot, we want to be able to reach them and they want cell phones so they can play texting games with their friends.

So, on Thursday, I'm likely to spend some time in a line to get an iPhone for me, and two less exciting phones for my children.

It was just 4 or 5 years ago that I was an anti-tech person, even though I work with computers for a living. I didn't own a microwave. I had no TV channels. No cell phone. An old tube TV. Dial-up internet access.

Now, I have a microwave, an LCD HDTV, a BluRay DVD player, HD DirecTV, two XM radios, and now I'm going to buy an iPhone. My friend Jim recently questioned whether or not I was even really a Vermonter anymore with all those toys. Maybe he'll be happy to hear that I still have dial-up internet because no other options exist. To be honest, I think I'd trade all of those other toys for broadband internet.

3 comments:

Yikes on the fall! Hope it's nothing too serious and you rebound okay. But good news on the iPhone. Despite my attempts to detach myself from consumerism, the siren song of that gadget is leading me astray... I really want one.